Sunday, May 22, 2011

A Boy's Story: The Red Transistor Radio

Fiction Sunday

This excerpt is part of a novel, Jack Miller's Story, which I
started writing more than fifteen years ago. It has undergone many
changes since then, but now is in a form that I find suitable for
publication. It contains biographical elements, no doubt, but it is not
biographical by any means. Memory, unlike mathematical operations, does
not always produce the same result.
******************

In Part 5,
Jack discovered the new sound of The Beatles and the sound of his generation, in sharp contrast to that of his parents. It was now the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love and the world's fair in Montreal.

It was 1967. Expo 67 and Montreal's World's Fair. Millions of tourists and visitors coming to Montreal. Some were curious onlookers. Some spoke with foreign accents. Some were draft dodgers, who never left. They looked like all the other teenagers walking the streets of Park Avenue, Mont Royal, Esplanade and Rachel, near and around the large park that locals called "the mountain."

It was the Summer of Love. Couples were holding hands at the mountain. Couples were wearing cool and groovy clothes. Everything was tie dye, bright psychedelic colours and bell bottoms. And long hair, both men and women. It was about freedom. Freedom to be one's self. With little restrictions. Conventionality was out. Rule-breaking, or at least rule-bending, was in.

Jack didn't really know or care about that. He was a good student, listened to his teachers and his parents. Generally. But he knew what he wanted more than anything in the world. And he wanted it now. It was part of the package of rights and freedoms that defined his generation. Jack was nine, and entering Grade 5.

Jack saw it and wanted it. It was in the window of the local electronics store on Park Avenue, a few blocks from his house. He ran to the store once more, passing the dry cleaners, passing the many Greek restaurants, the newstands and the stores that sold pots, pans, clothes and pens. All the cool kids were carrying them around, on his street and on the mountain. Transistor radios were everywhere and Jack wanted one, more than anything.

He finally saw one he wanted, a red transistor radio. He had a plan, He would ask his mother first, who would convince his father of the importance of it for Jackaleh.

It took some doing, some convincing, pleading, crying, but his father eventually went along. What is a transistor radio? he asked in Yiddish. Mama explained, and then his father asked his friends from the Old Country, those who had older children. They nodded their heads and waved their hands, saying, "Yes, get it for the boy. He's a good student, getting good marks in school? Azoy. It will be all right, then."

It happened one Sunday. Instead of their usual trip to the mountain, his father announced that today was the day. Jack's heart was pounding with excitement. He couldn't believe that it was finally happening. He walked the three blocks to the electronics store on Park Avenue near Fairmont.

There was no one else in the store save a young couple in their early twenties. He wearing a black skullcap and an equally dark caftan, over his white shirt, which ran to the tops of his black shoes; she wearing a dark-coloured dress covering her arms and down to her ankles, and a wig stylishly made adorned her pretty face. In her arms she carried a small baby, decked out in blue. They were at the far end of the store looking at baby carriages, which the store carried in addition to household items and electronic goods.

Jack leaned in to hear the conversation, spoken in Yiddish. The couple were discussing the merits of various types of baby carriages, and whether that one in particular was the same as the one their neighbours had. "That's the one I want," the young woman said. "That's the right one." The husband nodded in agreement.

Jack understood the words and the need for the right baby carriage. He couldn't understand the clothing they wore, which seemed more than was required for the hot days of summer. It was the middle of July and 85 degrees. His father, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and his trademark cloth cap, spoke and joked in Yiddish with the store owner, a man similar in mannerisms to his father. Jack's father seemed to only laugh in Yiddish. The discussions seemed to take a long time, and Jack had to wait patiently to get the right radio.

Finally he did. When he got it in his small hands, he turned it around. It was a Sony, model TR-63, "Made In Japan." All right, then, not as good as the American- or German-made brands. But that did not matter much; Jack Millerman had his radio and he could now listen to CFOX 1470 radio whenever he wanted, even outside the kitchen, where the family radio sat on the Formica counter.

He could even listen to his transistor radio outside on the front stoop, watching all the others with their transistor radios walking by and laughing. Jack Millerman was having fun, just like all the others. Like James and Jessica and Sam and Sarah, the beautiful brown-eyed girl in his class.

Hey where did we go, Days when the rains came Down in the hollow, Playin' a new game, Laughing and a running hey, hey Skipping and a jumping In the misty morning fog with Our hearts a thumpin' and you My brown eyed girl, You my brown eyed girl.

Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. While the author might
have been inspired by some true-life events, names, characters, places
and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;